Wealthy 'Cryonauts' Put Assets on Ice 538
Carl Bialik writes "'You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Pizer is one of about about 1,000 members of the "cryonics" movement who plan to put their bodies on ice soon after death so that in the future, medical advances can save them. A small, wealthy subset of these cryonauts is exploring ways to leave their money to themselves. 'With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated,' the Journal reports. 'Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world.'"
Or.... (Score:5, Funny)
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Re:Or.... (Score:4, Funny)
Or he could wake up in 30 years, travel back in time, start a company to rival his first one, get frozen again, wake up 30 years later (again), marry someone who was a kid when he knew her before, and live happily ever after on the royalties from both his competing companies.
Re:Or.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The upside is that your remaining money must be worth something, since it was a large enough bounty to bring about your revival.
you talk about something you know nothing about (Score:3, Interesting)
1. "all that money": Alcor is the best cryonics organization in the world. And there are only two...
But Alcor is a nonprofit, and no one working there makes much money at all. In fact, almost everyone working there is either poor or independently wealthy.
Also Alcor does not take in enough money to even cover its expenses. Most members are middle class, but some can afford to donate large sums, which is how Alcor stay
Re:you talk about something you know nothing about (Score:3, Interesting)
That's something someone who thinks they believe, or has learned to act like the believe, or who takes a religious te
Re:Or.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Wasn't there a Niven short story on this topic? I don't have the reference handy, but a guy with some terminal disease had his body frozen, expecting that a future generation would thaw him out when a cure had been discovered.
Thing was, he was revived thousands of years later, and while they had long since found a cure for his disease, he suddenly found himself with no money or rights. Hundreds of years before, the courts had establis
Re:Or.... (Score:2)
Interesting idea, but then, its a first season episode.
Re:Or.... (Score:2)
Clone of My Own (Score:5, Funny)
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y-chromosome changed to X
And when it is grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus)
Clone, clone of my own,
With your Y-Chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
Asimov and Garrett [commonplacebook.com]
Re:Or.... (Score:3, Funny)
Nah, not too soon in the future, people will start getting e-mails that say something to the effect:
Dear Mr Foobar
I represent the financial estate of a Mr David Pizer. I manage approximately $10M USD of a frozen Mr Pizer and his account. I'm giving you, of all people, an exclusive opportunity to share a 70/30 cut of this large sum of wasted, frozen money. But you must act fast! 419 other people were given this same offer to become r
You read it here first (Score:4, Interesting)
Good night.
Re:You read it here first (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You read it here first (Score:2, Interesting)
These people are doing it to avoid the dread of death. I don't think it should be legal. What if everyone who died just tied up their assets thi
Re:You read it here first (Score:2)
Re:You read it here first (Score:2)
There are two things certain... (Score:3, Funny)
What will actually happen is..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What will actually happen is..... (Score:2)
Old joke... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New joke (Score:3, Funny)
Re:New joke (Score:5, Informative)
Heinlein explored this basic concept (with a timewarp from a nuke) in Farhams Freehold.
-nB
Before any says... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before any says... (Score:2)
Re:Before any says... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Before any says... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo! I had a friend once who saw the movie Dead Presidents and he could not understand that printing money and giving it away would be a bad thing. On a side note, I was shocked recently when I found out that the US government or Alan Greenspan or whatever does this very thing.
Re:Before any says... (Score:2)
Re:Before any says... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pfff! 10 million is infinitessimal in relation to even the minted and coined (M0) money supply (AKA "cash"), which is itself already fairly small in comparison to the full (M3) money supply as a whole. On top of that the value of the money supply is additionally at the mercy of a myriad of external forces. In the larger scheme o
Re:Before any says... (Score:2)
Re:You forget the nano/biotech revolution comming. (Score:3, Insightful)
No it won't. Replicating nanobots are pure sci-fi, and nano assembly is going to stay industrial for at least the next 100 years. Slashdotters are not going to be able to create a woman out of sand anytime soon.
we should be able to advance nano/bio in the next 10 years to
STTNG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:STTNG (Score:2)
Re:STTNG (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the RIAA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:STTNG (Score:3, Interesting)
Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:5, Interesting)
A rich man who was dying had enough money to develop the technology to put himself on ice until medical technology was advance enough to cure his disease. He wakes up about 50 years later to find out that medical technology did indeed advance greatly over the years. But there was no cure for his disease. Instead, he was revived so the doctors could harvest his limbs for the veterans of the last World War who lost their arms and legs. Since he was beyond cure, the doctors figured his limbs were still useful to humanity. Advance technology rendered the rich man a basketcase.
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:3)
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:2)
One thing I do remember and that might help to identify the story was that he was sentenced to death at some poin
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:2)
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:2)
Re:Comical ethics of advance technology... (Score:2)
Rule against perpetuities (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rule against perpetuities (Score:3, Funny)
Then how do you explain the f'ed up Copyright system??
Re:Rule against perpetuities (Score:2, Interesting)
The rule against perpetuities, in most states, has an exemption for reversions to the original grantor. Furthermore, the original grantor fills in all the gaps created by grants that violate the rule against perpetuities. This means that it would present no bar to a person's estate retaining money even hundreds of years in the future. That said it would likely raise some very interesting legal issues.
Furthermore, many states have recently effectively eviserated the old common law rule against perpetui
Re:Rule against perpetuities (Score:2, Interesting)
link [72.14.203.104]
Doubtful legality (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also things such as Adverse Possession that could throw a wrench into things. I'd recommend that any 'cryonauts' conceive of any post-death, pre-revival arrangements to be tentative at best.
Re:Doubtful legality (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can say is, let it go. You don't own anything in perpetuity, not even the water and dirt your body is made of.
Re:Doubtful legality (Score:2)
Most of them weren't that lucky. Many of the tombs were plundered within generations of their being sealed (most likely by the people/families that built and knew the secrets of the tombs.) There's a few tombs in the VOTK that are populated with nearly a hundred mummies iirc,.. the priests were forced into moving the mummies into concentrated spots so they were better able to protect them from the plunderers. This
re-animation *after* death? (Score:2)
The only real winners are the lawyers (Score:2)
Re:The only real winners are the lawyers (Score:2)
Family members (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Family members (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course his greedier heirs would then have themselves frozen with orders to be revived when he wakes or is declared dead!
Yeah, sure, how will check up on these people? (Score:2)
The funds will be slowly leeched until you finally thaw and die, and at that point someone inherits it.
Also, if there is any kind of "$#!+ hits the fan" scenario, the government will confiscate these trust finds to finance the war. Again, you will thaw and die.
Re:Yeah, sure, how will check up on these people? (Score:2)
One small correction: You must be legally dead before you can be frozen (in the US at least). Anything else would be considered assisted suicide.
Re:Yeah, sure, how will check up on these people? (Score:2)
So, you are legally dead if you are frozen. If you are legally dead, and then revived, is our legal system prepared to handle that? Especially if you are revived some 50 years later.
"Yes, your honor, I was dead, but now I am alive again, and I want my things back."
I think a lot of cases would have to be decided to understand how to handle someone who comes back.
Re:Yeah, sure, how will check up on these people? (Score:2)
Why? A properly maintained trust *is* a business in and of itself. It's lifetime employement for the maintainer and a host of other people. You don't need to kill the Golden Goose, you just need to keep it going.
Ideally, the maintainers of the fund for "The Frozen" will plan on freezing themselves, as well. It's something that would keep running indefinitely.
Re:Yeah, sure, how will check up on these people? (Score:2)
However, if the owner of the trust is on ice, they really can't check up on the administrators. If you schluff money off the top, or orchestrate things to get the money into your hands, who is goi
H.G. Wells did it (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile in Applied Cyrogenics ... (Score:4, Funny)
Lou: Why do you always have to say it that way?
Terry: Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called showmanship? Come, your destiny awaits!"
Futurama Pilot
Or better yet.... (Score:2)
I see your quote and raise a Red Dwarf reference: (Score:2, Informative)
Fry: Alright!
Teller: And at an average of two-and-a-quarter percent interest over a period of 1000 years, that comes to
Don't forget to turn off the light! (Red Dwarf) (Score:5, Funny)
Holly: They're from the NorWEB Federation.
Lister: What's that?
Holly: NorthWestern Electricity Board. They want you, Dave.
Lister: Me? Why? What for?
Holly: For your crimes against humanity.
Lister: You what?!
Holly: Seems when you left Earth, three million years ago, you left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your kitchen.
Lister: Did I?
Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for three million years?
Lister: Yeh, they go mouldy.
Holly: Your sausages, Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's surface. Also, you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in your bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own 98% of all the world's wealth. And because you hoarded it for three million years, nobody's got any money except for you and NorWEB.
Lister: Why NorWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds.
Lister: A hundred and eighty billion pounds!! You're kidding!
Holly, wearing glasses, nose and moustache: April Fool.
Lister: But it's not April!
Holly: Yeah, I know. But I can't be waiting six months with a red-hot jape like that underneath me hat.
Nothing New Here (Score:2)
Hmmmm, Thank you, thank you very much.
Scary (Score:5, Funny)
You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it.
Does anyone else think this sounds like a bad horror movie?
Cryogenics and impotency. (Score:2, Funny)
Then again, I have not sustained, let alone maintained, an erection in a couple of decades. So maybe getting cryogenically frozen wouldn't be that harmful after all.
The easiest way. (Score:2)
If mind transfer technology is available, then do that, but that might be a ways further off.
You don't have to be rich. (Score:4, Interesting)
That mistaken assumption [alcor.org] is what caused me to take so long to take the plunge.
I'm a grad student, I make 20k/year, and I have a cryo contract. As a full-time student I pay $199 annually and my life insurance policy ($90k coverage) premiums cost about $1k per annually. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a term life insurance policy and I'd be paying in the low hundreds, but since by definition this is an arrangement you'd want to make for the duration of your life, I thought it would be better to lock in a good whole life insurance rate while I'm still young and healthy. Plus my policy has a safety margin of $10k over the $80k neurosuspension fee [alcor.org].
And that's me, a starving PhD student. Some of you people with real jobs can fund your cryo policy, and toss some money into a trust fund for yourself, and have some left over for charity and heirs.
Cryonics is a long-shot, but unlike many other beliefs about life after death, it doesn't contradict the observed laws of physics. I don't ridicule those beliefs or take any action to restrict them, no matter how alien to my way of thinking they may seem. I therefore expect a free and pluralistic society to reciprocate this courtesy toward my own beliefs.
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:2)
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps rich people are the ones worrying about preserving their assets for the future, but I don't want people to get the impression that you have to be rich to be a cryonicist.
Maybe not, but the OP has a point: if and when you wake up, will it do you much good to wake up a) broke, and b) without a marketable skill? You'll be about as useful to the new society as a buggy driver is to ours. Worse, you'll probably have a huge medical bill--while you've paid for the suspension (although how can they guarantee the rate?) you couldn't have possibly paid for the cure that will bring you back, as they can't at this point know how expensive it'll be to give you the cure, since it doesn't exist.
Really, that sounds great. You might wake up someday, but you'll be broke, jobless, a relative idiot, nowhere to live, no friends or family, and maybe will have a crushing medical bill. Thanks, but I think I might prefer to stay dead.
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:5, Funny)
So coming out of cryosleep is like graduating with a liberal arts degree, then?
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
Call me a throwback then, because I'd rather be alive and keep on struggling to s
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:3, Funny)
Or maybe, if you wake up you'll be assigned to a position in society based on your capabilities. Haven't you watched Futurama?
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
An advanced society may have altered the first so much that they are now super-humans compared to us and the changes go so deep they cannot "upgrade" a present-day person without destroying who they are. Assuming they have immortality this one must have a solution already present.
The second would probably cause less drastic changes, although again you'd be at a disadvant
Re:You don't have to be rich. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that you're ignoring a lot of learning (and *unlearning* that will have to be done).
One of the largest tasks I can think of that a linguist could face is to be confronted with a totally unknown language with no Rosetta Stone and have to work it out from scratch. I think that it would be a staggering achievement for most linguists to be able to write "Created the first dictionary to translate to and from this language".
And yet nearly every person in the world has done this *as a child*. They started out with no common ground -- they can't think "Okay, what's 'rock' in this language?". They figured out not only the language but all the concepts that it attempts to express. Even the guy that pumps gas at the gas station did that. That's an amazing intellectual accomplishment.
How long does it take to learn to use a computer effectively? I mean, ground zero, a computer newbie to the level that an power user on Slashdot has? Three years? Four years? Surely at least that.
You've spent a lot of time learning all this. If you get frozen at age sixty, that is *sixty years* of learning and training that you've expended on building yourself. Sure, some things stay the same -- the laws of physics are probably going to remain the same, and throwing a ball in the future is probably going to be similar to doing so in the present. But language shifts quickly -- English from a few hundred years ago is totally incomprehensible to an English speaker today. All the locations and things that you've learned -- how to drive a car, etc -- are useless. And there's knowledge to be *unlearned*, as well -- maybe there are no toilets in the future. Maybe cooking knowledge is obsolete in the future because we have automated food production devices that everyone uses.
Maybe for a young child, this wouldn't be so drastic, but I think that it would be quite a shift for a senior citizen.
I mean, honestly, suppose Benjamin Franklin was around today. In his time, he was a learned man in many fields and a scientist, as well as a diplomat. But today, we've shot so far by him in the fields he student that he wouldn't have much more applicable knowledge than a teen would. Mathematics is still the same, but the ability to rapidly do arithmetic is no longer a crucial skill. You don't ride horses, you don't use an outhouse, we have childproof caps on medicine bottles. Our aesthetics have changed -- the comfortable styles that he grew up with will be gone, replaced by smooth, simple, artificial structures. His political knowledge would be out of date and useless. Social norms are quite different from his day. Heck, he didn't have *railroads* in his time. I'm sure that based on who he is and the fact that he was exceptional for his time, he'd find a way to get along...but I don't think that it would be all that easy. And the question really is -- would society be better off with an aging man with a good knowledge from 250 years ago, or someone who has learned from the start to live in current societyy.
I also wouldn't trust the cryo-storage companies. They plan to keep you frozen for, what, a hundred years? No company worries about anything one hundred years in the future. Four is usually pushing it. Nobody except for maybe your great-great-grandkids will have an interest in ensuring that you are safely revived.
Instant (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Instant (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that any of those are possible, but I am saying that, since no human being has ever been frozen, suspended for a "long" period of time, and then thawed and revived, saying anything about the subjective experience is an iffy proposition.
I suspect that you're right - likely there'll be no notice of the lapsed time - but I wouldn't rule anything else out.
Me, I'll probably get fr
Re:Instant (Score:3, Insightful)
So by the very definition of cryogenics you would be thoughtless and completely unconscious for the entire time. Apart maybe from any wake-up period which possibly might be required during reanimat
Re:Instant (Score:4, Insightful)
Heh. You hope it seems instantateous, at least. Until we thaw one of those suckers out and reanimate 'em, we won't know if they wake up saying "what was that?" or "OH MY GOD WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG, THE ETERNAL FREEZING LIMBO!!!!!!!!!"
Mr Pizer, please wake up now... (Score:5, Funny)
Who would want you? (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, if the technology worked as planned, what would you do after being thawed? Go back to grade school to catch
So... Even if we do get enough advances medically (Score:2, Insightful)
decisions (Score:2, Insightful)
"I figure I have a better than even chance of coming back," he says. *laughing* based on WHAT?? Just goes to show - wealth doesn't corrolate with intelligence.
(personally, I reckon his chances are more like 42%...
Reality cheque (Score:3, Funny)
Your Soul Moves On When The Body Dies (Score:2)
When the body dies, your spirit (**you**) move on. This should be very familiar with you Pagans
out there. (Remeber that Sahman; Haloween; is the time when we re-unite with the spirits of our
dead ancestors).
Yes, science may be able to resurrect a dead body.
But, what soul will inhabit it at that time? Most likely it will be either someone else or perhaps
no soul at all. Perhaps you will end up with a 'living vegstible' with no spir
Futurerama Reference (Score:2)
Buried Treasure. (Score:2)
Down The Road (Score:2)
Tax Em (Score:4, Funny)
This is Nothing New (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
asset trusts limited to living beneficeries (Score:3, Insightful)
To be blunt, the even the dead cant avoid taxes forever. The concept of the dead and unborn owning assets is alien to current law.
Synaptic degeneration (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps your body could come back, but unless you are frozen pretty much immediately upon onset of lethal hypoxia, the brain you come back with will not be much like your own.
One Word (Score:2)
Re:Or..... (Score:2)
Re:Or..... (Score:3, Insightful)
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandpa
Re:Or..... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's completely not true. You don't think that people's immune systems in any given generation just luckily happen to be attuned to exactly the germs which will be around during their lifetimes? The immune system is extremely adaptable and will effectively attack nearly any foreign menace. We don't have to rely on it evolving to match specific germs that go through a million times as many evolutionary generations as we do.
(As a side note, it's typically not advantageous for infectious agents to evolve to kill their hosts anyway, except under crowded and unsanitary conditions where they can spread very quickly. Many germs could well evolve to be less deadly as world sanitation improves.)
You're probably thinking of the (extremely plausible) argument that the main evolutionary purpose of sex is to "change the locks" against such parasites. But the point of this is more that a genetically uniform population would be vulnerable, so lineages that could vary their genetic makeup would gain an advantage; not that genetic change is the primary line of defense against parasites. Luckily for all of us, it isn't.
Re:Or..... (Score:3, Informative)
IANAD, but I am a med student. People are always worried about "viruses from space" coming to destroy us because our immune systems "won't be able to handle it". This is a crock of bullshit. Our immune systems are extremely effective at handling any foreign substances. The dangerous ones are those that have specifically evolved to trick our immune systems. The body (through an extremely complex & inefficient process) can generate antibodies to practically any pathogen.
Though